Methods and apparatus for generating lists of scheduled programs for watching based on user preferences have previously been suggested by Wehmeyer, et al., U.S. Pat. No. 5,867,226, which disclosed a television system in which at least program title information for programs which are to be transmitted in the future is transmitted in advance to form a channel guide listing, apparatus is provided for searching for specific television programs which satisfy certain criteria concerning a user's viewing preferences, and upon successful conclusion to the search, the apparatus generates a list of such television programs in order to predict for the viewer certain programs which may be of interest. According to Wehmeyer, et al., a list of predictions of television programs which the viewer might find interesting can be generated from program guide data corresponding to future programs which is broadcast combined with data corresponding to programs previously watched using the apparatus. According to Wehmeyer, et al., whenever a program is watched for a given period of time, for example, 5 minutes or more, the system keeps a record and thereby the viewing habits and preferences can be determined, which allows the system to predict which upcoming programs should be of interest to the users of the apparatus.
The Wehmeyer, et al. apparatus stores information about the particular television shows which the user watches and uses that information as search criteria. Although the search criteria is editable by the viewer to further refine the searches, only limited amount user editable capability is provided.
In addition, present inventors recognized the drawback with some prior methods and apparatus which assume previous viewing of a program with a particular characteristic for even a few minutes should be considered in the selection criteria.
Because of the limitations of the prior systems and methods as described abvoe, suggested programs were often listed which were not very consistent with the viewer's actual preferences and tendencies.